WhatsApp hits 1.5 billion monthly active users

Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014 for $19 billion. After the acquisition, the instant messaging platform has started becoming smarter. We say so as Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook has announced during the Q4 2017 earnings call that WhatsApp has 1.5 billion monthly active users. It was also announced that the platform has witnessed 60 billion messages sent per day.

This is a significant growth in comparison to 2014 as the platform had just 450 million monthly active users and 315 million daily active users back then. In July 2017, WhatsApp had 1.3 billion monthly active users and 1 billion daily active users.

Zuckerberg also went on stating that Instagram and WhatsApp have occupied the first and second positions when it comes to the most popular Story sharing products. Given that these features are clones of Snapchat stories, they have become more popular pushing Snapchat behind them. Notably, Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status have 300 million daily active users each while Snapchat as a whole has 178 million daily active users.

Currently, WhatsApp has 200 million monthly active users in India. Given that the company is focusing on India, this number is also expected to go high in the near future. WhatsApp is focused on rolling out many new features to the users in order to enhance their user experience and engagement as well on the platform.

WhatsApp live location sharing feature to Android and iOS

To help the businesses communicate with their customers in a better way, WhatsApp rolled out the WhatsApp Business standalone app. This is a free app that is available for the Android users. The small businesses in India can make use of the same to establish a better engagement with their customers. It lets them connect with their customers easily and conveniently and users can also chat with the businesses that matter the most to them.

Taking inputs from IANS, when it comes to the Indian market, it is said that 84% of the SMBs consider WhatsApp helps them communicate with their customers and 80% of the SMBs over here consider that WhatsApp Business helps them grow their business.